Op-ed: Why my first novel will only cost you $0.99

Take it from the founder of Rhapsody—letting piracy corner a content market is death.

Rob Reid (@rob_reid) is a novelist, entrepreneur, and music industry expert. He's also a xenobiologist with a specialty in interstellar copyright. His 2012 science fiction novel, Year Zero, is available from Random House at $0.99 in the US for a limited time.

Random House is pricing my first novel like an MP3 single. And as the founder of the company that built the Rhapsody music service, I’m thrilled. The reason is that I love writing fiction, but building a big audience for self-published books would require ghoulish levels of social media stamina that I lack (proof: this is only my third blog post in 14 months). This means that if I want to reach readers—and I do—I need the backing and support of a publisher. Make that a solvent publisher.

So hats off to Random House for testing out pricing tactics that some would view as kamikaze lunacy. They released the paperback edition of my novel Year Zero just six month ago. And for at least a few days, the e-book will undersell it by 93 percent (as Amazon conveniently calculates on its Kindle page). Random House wasn't counting on my paperback sales to make its quarter, but it has been experimenting relentlessly with pricing for at least a year now—and not just with small fries like me.

Being reliant on publisher solvency, I’m delighted. This is the only way to survive when the time-honored rules of your industry are collapsing or rewriting themselves all around you. You experiment. You learn. You adapt. You don’t do what the music industry did when faced with its digital bogeyman and whine, litigate, and deny.

I had a front-row seat to that horror show back when we were building Rhapsody. And having watched the American music industry bleed out half of its revenues over 10 years, I sure don’t want publishing to do the same. If my own novel is to be believed (and to be perfectly clear—IT IS NOT), it’s precisely these sorts of shenanigans that can DESTROY THE EARTH ITSELF. (For a brief explanation, you can watch Year Zero’s animated trailer below.)

A convenient fiction that still makes the rounds blames music’s gruesome decade on Napster-abetted piracy. This is like saying that the outsiders commonly called Barbarians caused Rome’s collapse. Rome conquered the Samnites, Carthage, and Hellenist empires and countless other well-oiled foes. But Rome ultimately fell because it reacted to the Barbarian threat in wholly self-destructive ways, not because the mere existence of Barbarians magically doomed history’s greatest empire.

Piracy was the Barbarian horde to the music industry’s Rome (and I won’t say who played Caligula—although Vivend/Universal’s Jean Marie Messier sure had an ego on him). Piracy wasn’t lethal in and of itself. But it could be (and was) exceptionally dangerous if dealt with clumsily. Entire books have been written about the major music labels’ boo-boos in the age of file sharing. But to me, the uber-blunder was their dogged refusal to sell digital products on any terms, or at any price, throughout the Internet’s formative years.

To put this in context, recall that downloading constituted the umpteenth format in recorded music’s 125-year history. And during that time, nothing—not waxen cylinders, LPs, 8-tracks, cassettes, or CDs—generated more immediate desire among music lovers. Despite this, the major labels embargoed their catalogs from downloading for almost half a decade after Napster’s rise.

And so the music-loving public went from acute excitement over the new format to acute confusion over its absence from any legitimate store. From there it was a short jaunt to a prohibition mindset, one that basically said, 'This stuff is fabulous, it is illegal, and that is insane. And I am therefore not a criminal for desiring it.' So over five years, literally hundreds of millions of people grew comfortable on every level with piracy.

By the time the labels grudgingly started licensing their catalogs, they had given illicit file sharing a massive head start. Habits die hard, and free is an especially easy price to acclimate to. So the paid-for online music industry will struggle for many more years to overcome the enormous beachhead that the major labels granted to file sharing. The lesson here is not that digital piracy automatically dooms content industries. The lesson is that you should never, ever give piracy a five-year monopoly on awesomeness—as I argued in this piece in the Wall Street Journal.

I’ll barely make a dime from Random House’s rock-bottom pricing experiment with my novel. But in a digitizing industry, the only way forward is to embrace the chaos. Bold experiments are teaching publishers a lot about price elasticity, “windowing” (what the studios do in marching films from theaters to DVDs to broadcast, etc.), and more. For its part, publishing is thriving several years after e-books went mainstream, in stark contrast to the music industry’s fate.

For years, we pleaded with the major labels to at least experiment with selling downloads for $0.99 a song. We were always told that this would “devalue” music. As if the only way to properly honor that one Chumbawumba song (yes, it was that long ago…) was to charge $15.99 to get it glued to 11 other songs in a full-length CD. Wrong. What truly devalued music was requiring the downloading public to pirate it rather than purchase it for five long years.

If after reading all this you’re interested in a 357-page yarn about a vast alien civilization that’s so into American pop music that it accidentally commits the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang (thereby bankrupting the entire universe), for at least the next couple of days, US-based readers can grab the e-book for $0.99 at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, eBooks, Google Play, diesel, iTunes/iBookstore, Kobo, or Sony.

Promoted Comments

Hey all - in answer to a number of points, yes the offer is (maddeningly) only available in the US ... for the MOST part. Folks on Twitter & commenters on my blog (where this piece initially ran) have told me that you can get it for 99¢ in Australia (not sure if that's Aus or US cents!) and in the "diesl" store in the UK also for 99¢ (not sure if that's ... pence?). The US-only-ness of the offer is notes in the "preamble" to the article, but NOT prominently enough - my fault and apologies!

As for DRM, this is a board-level issue at gigantic media co's like Random House/Bertelsman/Penguin (and I could probably add about 50 other imprint names-with-slashes to the list - they're huuuuge). So far the only major publisher to experiment with DRM-free that I'm personally aware of has been Macmillan, specifically with Tor Books (their F&SF imprint).

I'm racing off to a meeting, but will revisit this comment section in a few hours & will try to reply to anything else that comes up. Thanks, all!

Hey all - I've been away from this thread for a while & wanted to reply to a couple of themes that came up in the interim (this is the Rob who wrote the piece).

A number of you asked if I was aware of Baen (for those who don't know them, they're a fantastic publisher of fantasy & SF, and publish their eBooks without DRM). The answer is yes - I think they're amazing and am quite aware of what they've done online. When I said that Macmillan/Tor was the only "major" publisher that I was aware of shipping DRM-free eBooks, I was using "major" in a jargon-y way ... specifically, in reference to the "Big Five" international publishers (Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Random House/Penguin, and Simon & Schuster).

To the Chumbawumba partisans ... there are many other late 90's/early 00's artists known primarily for a single song who deserve quite a bit more ribbing than Chumbawumba. It's just that none of them have a name that's remotely as fun as Chumbawumba. That's why I cite Chumbawumba as often as possible (imagine this sentence with "The Proclaimers" in it four times instead of Chumbawumba. Much less fun, right?).

Some argued that the major publishers have been every bit as bad as (or almost as bad) as the major record labels when it comes to adopting digital. I strongly disagree. While the publishers haven't been as bold or aggressive as many of us would like in many respects, they're in a radically different league from the labels. Note I do not say that they're perfect - just in a wholly different realm than the labels, who could have hardly botched digital more than they did. Incidentally - this does NOT mean that I think publishers are all geniuses or that music people are all nincompoops. The publishers (and TV, film, etc) were able to learn from the dismal example of the music folks who had the awful misfortune of going first..

There is a LOT of underlying nuance to my view on the whole publishing vs. music thing, and laid out much of it in this fairly lengthy WSJ piece a bit more than a year ago: http://on.wsj.com/KVJMA9

Hrm, as a Canadian and an avid reader of scify/fantasy, I hope I can get that from Amazon.com. Personally I will pay up to 6 dollars for an ebook. I believe that that is a fair price for an electronic version of text. I have been purchasing products from Baen for many years and they have the fairest prices that I have seen for a wide variety of authors. They even have free books to hook you on series.

Good Luck with your writing.

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Or not. Looks like pricing for Canadians on the Amazon.com website is 14.47 for the kindle version. Even Amazon.ca has the kindle version for 12.99. I'll guess I'll miss out on this.

Letting piracy get the monopoly on awesomeness has pretty much ruined me. I like to pay for things, but I'll admit, I'll only pay when I agree on the price and the conditions. Whilst there's a marketplace, I can chose to leave it aside when it's fucked up.

Video is the biggest offender. $20 for old movies is something I will never pay, and I don't care enough to pirate them. Lower the price to $10 and you have a sale you wouldn't have had, and probably stopped a shitton of pirates in the mean time.

OK, I know Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein--I met them IN THE LIBRARY. Paid nothing for the privilege of an introduction, too. (Paid plenty since then, for a few hundred Sci Fi books by them and others of their ilk.)

Herewith a modest proposal. Give your eBook away to libraries. Get your audience hooked young, and you can live off them all the rest of their lives.

£6.74 in the UK - thats $10.77 - I think thats my biggest problem with digital distribution - why the price difference when the costs to distribute are the same no matter what country the purchaser is in? I understand taxes etc, but thats not whats going on here.....

£6.74 in the UK - thats $10.77 - I think thats my biggest problem with digital distribution - why the price difference when the costs to distribute are the same no matter what country the purchaser is in? I understand taxes etc, but thats not whats going on here.....

It's a scam. The publishers first excuse for paper books was that paper cost TONS of money. When ebook came out and the price was the same or more than paper. The publisher's excuse was .. umm.. editing and art cost TONS of money ..

A great article, and I will definitely be picking up your book for $0.99. I'm not a huge sci-fi reading fan, but I like the cut of your jib and could probably use some off TV and computer time.

On a related note, the movie and TV industry is doing the same thing. They do asinine things like charging $45 for a ridiculous package including a standard Blu-Ray, the 3D Blu-Ray, the DVD AND a Digital Copy (which is half a step away from worthless because of the DRM). I just want the Blu-Ray. Why can't I have one disk at a fair price, like $10? I won't pirate anything, but that doesn't mean that others will be as honest as to not download the thing out of respect for your idiotic pricing. Absolutely wreaks of the whole "devaluing" thing mentioned in the article. Instead of pricing a single disk fairly, you're driving users to pirate. Fantastic.

TV is the same. They keep the same outdated channel bundling scheme coupled with shunning Netflix and other streaming services and creating their own half baked solution. Then there are cases like Game of Thrones where you can't legally buy the show anywhere except to subscribe to HBO.

While I realize I am probably in the minority since the jokes about that song/album by Chmbawumba still come up but I liked pretty much that entire album. Several songs I eventually liked more than the hit of the cd, cause radio overplayed it. Granted I had a friend recommend it to me and I had heard the entire thing a couple times before I bought it, since we did carpooling at lunch and they already bought it.

Don't be so sure on the pricing. If anything Steam figures demonstrate that, with enough visibility, lower prices can lead to massive sales totals. The problem is visibility in ALL the software download markets still sucks.

Hey all - in answer to a number of points, yes the offer is (maddeningly) only available in the US ... for the MOST part. Folks on Twitter & commenters on my blog (where this piece initially ran) have told me that you can get it for 99¢ in Australia (not sure if that's Aus or US cents!) and in the "diesl" store in the UK also for 99¢ (not sure if that's ... pence?). The US-only-ness of the offer is notes in the "preamble" to the article, but NOT prominently enough - my fault and apologies!

As for DRM, this is a board-level issue at gigantic media co's like Random House/Bertelsman/Penguin (and I could probably add about 50 other imprint names-with-slashes to the list - they're huuuuge). So far the only major publisher to experiment with DRM-free that I'm personally aware of has been Macmillan, specifically with Tor Books (their F&SF imprint).

I'm racing off to a meeting, but will revisit this comment section in a few hours & will try to reply to anything else that comes up. Thanks, all!

I think a large part of the problem is that they over-priced music so much, especially when dvds are right nearby at comparable, or cheaper, prices. A great example of this is buying the entire matrix dvd set for the same price as the soundtrack to the first movie.

Movies require so much more investment than music does, so why are they the same price?

I think a large part of the problem is that they over-priced music so much, especially when dvds are right nearby at comparable, or cheaper, prices. A great example of this is buying the entire matrix dvd set for the same price as the soundtrack to the first movie.

Movies require so much more investment than music does, so why are they the same price?

Anyone who raised their hands and yelled Greed!, give yourself a cookie.

Don't be so sure this pricing will not bring you more total income. Getting more readers who will buy your next books is worth more than a profit on just this book. If you hang out at MobileRead at all you know that most of us are appalled by the general pricing of e-books. Most of my paper book purchases were cheaper than most of my e-book purchases, and I could loan, gift, or sell paper books when I was done with them.

Hrm, as a Canadian and an avid reader of scify/fantasy, I hope I can get that from Amazon.com. Personally I will pay up to 6 dollars for an ebook. I believe that that is a fair price for an electronic version of text. I have been purchasing products from Baen for many years and they have the fairest prices that I have seen for a wide variety of authors. They even have free books to hook you on series.

Good Luck with your writing.

---

Or not. Looks like pricing for Canadians on the Amazon.com website is 14.47 for the kindle version. Even Amazon.ca has the kindle version for 12.99. I'll guess I'll miss out on this.

Odd. Living in Finland I have to choose either the US or UK Kindle stores. I have always used the US one. Amazon knows my address is in Finland and I still get the $0.99 version.

Here's the problem: people will listen to a 99 cent song, watch a 99 sent TV show and play a 99 cent game. Lower costs mean people will experience more of these things,

People will not read their 99 cent books. Sure, they'll buy them and stick their purchases on Facebook and Twitter, and fill their virtual book shelves, but they won't read more.

...in my opinion of course.

Not true. I went to Amazon to pick up Doctor Sleep a couple of weeks ago and it recommended a series of Star Trek TNG books from 4 years after Data died for $0.99 a piece x3. I snatched those up and am reading them now.

I still maintain that today's sales are normal for the music industry, and the sales they had in the 1990s were artificially high. In the 1990s, there was a huge format shift from fragile LPs, cassettes, etc to better-sounding, more sturdy CDs, which caused an artificially high period of sales as people bought music they already had in older formats on CD. This was a demographic thing, as people who grew up with older formats suddenly had jobs and could afford CD collections. By the early 2000s, anyone who wanted an album on CD pretty much already had it, and the sales decline set in because not that many people were interested in new music. After all, there was another demographic shift with rap, dance, and computer-processed music that older people didn't like, and teens would buy only once in CD format - or MP3 - and never format shift. So this shift to CD will never happen again, and music sales now are normal.

Fiction books are always going to be a hard sell, because there's more supply than demand. Even without digital books, the piles of remaindered close-out books in bookstores are generally not Civil War historical research or theology, they're disposable fiction. There's way too much fiction being published.

I did the same pricing strategy with my short ebook... but unfortunately for small publishers on Amazon the commission rates drop dramatically south of USD $2.99. As other venues like iTunes want pricing to be equal to their competitors, authors have to bottom out at the highest rate in order to make reasonable commissions.

If it wasn't for that, I would've definitely gone down to $0.99 (of course, the same price international as opposed to USD $0.99 and CAD $14.99

I immediately decided to buy this after reading the first sentence of the last paragraph:

Quote:

If after reading all this you’re interested in a 357-page yarn about a vast alien civilization that’s so into American pop music that it accidentally commits the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang (thereby bankrupting the entire universe)"

Had already clicked through to the google & kobo links while finishing up reading that sentence. Then saw "US-based" readers and might and behold: 14,14€ on Kobo, 15,95€ on Amazon. That's $19,18 and $21,64 us dollars respectively.

I hope the experiment succeeds and will be able to find an international audience ultimately. I also hope I'll be able to lend it somewhere or buy second hand, like a book.